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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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My sons tell me that one of their
happiest memories of Christmas past is the custom we had of gathering around
the tree on Christmas morning to re-read Robert Benchley’s
delightful essay, “Editha’s
Christmas Burglar.”

All too briefly summarized, this
happy little story tells about Editha,
a darling child, who
wakes on a Christmas Eve upon hearing noises downstairs and, concluding
that it must be a burglar, determined to go downstairs and convert
him. But the burglar proves resistant to her innocent sweetness and ends up
taking a rope out of his bag and tying her up good and tight, with
a nice bright bandana handkerchief around her mouth, and
trussing her up on the chandelier. “Then,
filling his bag with the
silverware and Daddy’s imitation sherry, Editha’s
burglar tiptoed out by the door. As he left, he
turned and smiled. ‘A Merry Christmas to all and to all a
Good Night,’ he whispered and was gone.”

There was never any doubt where the boys’ sympathies
lay. Childhood may be any of a number of the sweet things sentimentalists say
it is, but the one thing it is not is innocent.
The old, now unhappily abandoned Order of Holy
Baptism had it right when it instructed the minister to inform the people that
children are conceived and born in sin and so are under the wrath of God. The
cheerful conclusion to those otherwise forbidding words is that, however
one’s life may unfold,
it can’t get a whole lot worse than it began.
For parents, there is the equally happy thought that
any small progress they may make toward civilizing and Christianizing the child
is to be accounted a major accomplishment worthy to be set over against their all too many
manifest failures.

Anyway, justified
by Baptismal grace but not yet far advanced toward sanctification, our
boys cheered the burglar on and rejoiced at the thought of Editha pendant from
the chandelier, “sore as a crab. “It
seemed to them only right and proper that,
in a universe governed by
justice, the little con artist got her comeuppance
while her intended quarry tiptoed out with the silver and the imitation sherry.
For even at their tender age,
they had an instinct that a
straightforward burglar is better than a sanctimonious little manipulator.

It is an instinct which needs to be
cultivated, especially as each happy Christmas dawns
on earth again. For there is in the very air of a modern sentimentalized, commercialized
Christmas the fetid odor of manipulation. Every heartstring gets tugged by
somebody, every surge of warm sentiment gets
enlisted in the service of some cause,
good, bad, or
indifferent. We are tempted to buy more than we can afford, or
even want, to assuage guilt-feelings that we cannot
fully explain. We are invited to revel in a nostalgia which becomes the subject
of slick jokes on the comedy shows of the day after Christmas.

Pope Liberius, in
354 AD, fixed 25 December as the date of
Christmas, apparently in the pious hope that the
celebration of the Nativity would provide Christians with a wholesome
alternative to the wild festival of the Saturnalia, which
was celebrated at the winter solstice. Alas! It hasn’t
turned out that way. Saturnalia has triumphed—the chief difference being that
our Christian excesses are more commonly those of the spirit than of the flesh.
And so the question becomes one of whether we should not simply write of the
good Pope’s noble experiment and follow the
Puritans in eschewing the celebration of Christmas. My tentative answer is No.
I still think that Christmas may be salvageable. But I am sure that it will
take some doing.

What the world will finally do about
Christmas I do not know or greatly care. But Christian people, I
suspect, will learn someday that they cannot make
anything more of Christmas than they make of Advent. And what we presently make
of Advent is very little. Advent is chiefly the season of X number of shopping
days until Christmas. It is a time of foot-sore shopping,
of baking and decorating and making lists. For some, it
is even a season of irritation with the church, for it
is a time when “liturgical nuts” insist
on Wednesday evening services and austere,
undecorated chancels, and
penitential hymns that contrast bleakly with the carols pouring forth from the
downtown PA systems.

How,
then, to
get across to the faithful that there is nothing like a proper Advent to get
one ready for a proper

Christmas? How to invest the idea of
Coming (which is what Advent means) with hope and joy and expectation?

I do not know. But I do know that the
birth of this Child can mean little or nothing if we are unaware of how desperately
we need the love and salvation which He brings. And I do know that this
awareness will not come from the manipulation of our emotions, but
the searing of our hearts and consciences. Until Israel knows that she is
captive, she will not cry out for Emmanuel to
come. And until she cries out,
He will not come. But when
He does come in response to her cries there will be such rejoicing as you never
heard before in your life.